On Monday, we learned that the IRS didn't single out tea party groups after all. Instead, they were looking for political groups, including not just tea party groups, but progressive groups as well. They may have used a flawed method for flagging the groups, but the IRS's intent was clear: to identify political groups that were not legally entitled to receive the tax-exempt benefit they sought to receive.

That pretty much brought the IRS "scandal" to a screeching halt. In the hours following the revelation, Darrell Issa's Twitter feed suddenly started spamming tweets about Benghazi. "Change the subject, quickly!" he seemed to be saying.

But there's still a question to be answered. If the IRS was targeting political groups from across the ideological spectrum, where did the original narrative about tea party targeting come from? The answer makes Darrell Issa and his fellow House Republicans look even worse than they did on Monday:

The Treasury inspector general (IG) whose report helped drive the IRS targeting controversy says it limited its examination to conservative groups because of a request from House Republicans.

A spokesman for Russell George, Treasury’s inspector general for tax administration, said they were asked by House Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.)“to narrowly focus on Tea Party organizations.”

Obviously, if Issa wanted a comprehensive investigation, he should have asked for a review of all politically oriented scrutiny. Instead, he asked for exclusive focus on tea party and conservative groups. Under the most charitable interpretation of this, it never occurred to Darrell Issa that anyone other than the tea party groups could have been targeted. If that's true, it suggests he just doesn't care about whether the IRS "targets" anyone other than his political allies.

But I think the most likely explanation here is that Issa was simply trying to cook up a scandal, even though it did nothing to address the genuine problems with the way campaign finance and tax laws are written. He probably figured that in the best case scenario, he'd be able to get away with his fraud. And in the worst case scenario, he'd get a slap on the wrist from a few reporters, but endless approval from his political supporters....

...“It’s not genetics. It’s not DNA. It’s not pieces of DNA. It’s epigenetics,” says Sergey Gavrilets, a NIMBioS researcher and an author on the paper that outlines the new theory of homosexuality, published in The Quarterly Review of Biology.“The hypothesis we put forward is based on epigenetic marks,” he says.

To be specific, the new theory suggests that homosexuality is caused by epigenetic marks, or “epi-marks,” related to sensitivity to hormones in the womb. These are compounds that sit on DNA and regulate how active, or inactive certain genes are, and also control when during development these genes are most prolific. Gavrilets and his colleagues believe that gene expression may regulate how a fetus responds to testosterone, the all-important male sex hormone. They further argue that epi-marks may help to buffer a female fetus from high levels of testosterone by suppressing receptors that respond to testosterone, for example,(thus ensuring normal fetal development even in the presence of a lot of testosterone) or to buffer a male fetus from low levels of testosterone by upregulating receptors that bind to the hormone (ensuring normal fetal development even in the absence of high levels of testosterone). Normally, these epi-marks are erased after they are activated, but if those marks are passed down to the next generation, the same epi-marks that protected a man in utero may cause oversensitivity to testosterone among his daughters, and the epi-marks that protected a woman in utero may lead to undersensitivity to testosterone among her sons.

...The new theory is important because it synthesizes well-tested and well-developed evolutionary principles with cutting-edge research in molecular biology and biological computation. Epigenetics is not a new concept exactly, but the field has exploded within the past decade. Where once it seemed that genes and environment were distinct, or that nature and nurture were distinct, now it seems clear that environment itself may change the ways in which our genes function – even though the genes themselves are essentially fixed over time, barring occasional mutations, and conserved across generations.

For now, the work is still controversial. Gavrilets says he and his colleagues have been criticized both by conservatives, who weren’t happy with people searching for a biological basis to homosexuality, as well as by some in the gay and lesbian community, who feel they shouldn’t require a scientific investigation to justify who they are.

“It’s been a controversial topic,” Gavrilets says.“There is a lot of misconception in the world about the topic of homosexuality.” Still, he says,“One of the roles of science is to clear up misconceptions, to explain different phenomena or different patterns.”

Typical Right Wing Wacko logic :In his dissent in the DOMA case - Scalia whines that activists courts shouldn't overturn the laws enacted by the people's representatives.Why, that would be substituting the Supremes own views for the people's will as expressed by their elected representatives.Of course Scalia himself has voted dozens of times to overturn congressional and state laws, including the very same day he claimed to object to overturning the laws.Scalia, Thomas, Roberts, and Alito - against judicial activism - except when they are for it.Can anyone take RWW logic seriously ?

Really?? "News reports that California's Prop 8 has been struck down as unconstitutional are completely false."

<quoted text>You seem to know more about Episcopal churches than I. A couple that I am friends with have a gay son and they won't consider attending any other church, but Episcopal because of it. I attended a funeral with them and that particular church is VERY liberal. So perhaps it's a church by church thing, too.I didn't think it was legal in GA, but it could be next. Atlanta has a HUGE gay community.

The Episcopal Church derived from the “Church of England.”In its modern form, the church dates from the English Reformation of the 16th century, when royal supremacy was established and the authority of the papacy was repudiated. Thomas Cromwell was one of the strongest advocates of the English Reformation. He helped to engineer an annulment of the king's marriage to the Spanish princess Catherine of Aragon, in order to allow Henry to marry his mistress Anne Boleyn. After failure to obtain approval from the Pope, in 1534 parliament endorsed the king's claim to be head of a breakaway Church of England, and Cromwell supervised the new church from the unique posts of vicegerent in spirituals and vicar general.During his rise, Cromwell made many enemies, especially among the conservative faction at court. He fell from power after arranging the king's marriage to a German princess, Anne of Cleves. Cromwell hoped that the marriage would breathe fresh life into the Reformation in England, but it turned into a disaster for Cromwell and ended in annulment just six months later. Cromwell was arraigned under a bill of attainder and executed for treason and heresy on Tower Hill on 28 July 1540. The king later expressed regret at the loss of his chief minister.

And like in the time of King Henry VIII,(all to satisfy his sexual urge for another woman), today the Episcopal Church,(all to satisfy the homosexual urges), declare support for Homosexual marriages.

Always dependent on government money to exist, it fell into hard times after “The "American Revolution left the Anglican parishes shattered, stripped of most of their financial support, weakened by the flight of many clergy and thousands of members, with a number of buildings destroyed and property lost," wrote Powell Mills Dawley in Our Christian Heritage (Morehouse-Gorham, 1959).”

After the American Revolution, support for the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel was cut off, and public support of churches was withdrawn because of newly accepted principle of separation of church and state.

But in 2011, the Episcopal Church,(specifically the National Cathedral), is now back in high cotton, receiving federal tax dollars to continue in their excess of supporting sexual deviants.

Who coulda imagined....WED JUN 26, 2013 AT 01:30 PM PDTHere's how Darrell Issa manufactured the IRS 'scandal'by Jed LewisonOn Monday, we learned that the IRS didn't single out tea party groups after all. Instead, they were looking for political groups, including not just tea party groups, but progressive groups as well. They may have used a flawed method for flagging the groups, but the IRS's intent was clear: to identify political groups that were not legally entitled to receive the tax-exempt benefit they sought to receive.That pretty much brought the IRS "scandal" to a screeching halt. In the hours following the revelation, Darrell Issa's Twitter feed suddenly started spamming tweets about Benghazi. "Change the subject, quickly!" he seemed to be saying.But there's still a question to be answered. If the IRS was targeting political groups from across the ideological spectrum, where did the original narrative about tea party targeting come from? The answer makes Darrell Issa and his fellow House Republicans look even worse than they did on Monday:The Treasury inspector general (IG) whose report helped drive the IRS targeting controversy says it limited its examination to conservative groups because of a request from House Republicans.A spokesman for Russell George, Treasury’s inspector general for tax administration, said they were asked by House Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.)“to narrowly focus on Tea Party organizations.”Obviously, if Issa wanted a comprehensive investigation, he should have asked for a review of all politically oriented scrutiny. Instead, he asked for exclusive focus on tea party and conservative groups. Under the most charitable interpretation of this, it never occurred to Darrell Issa that anyone other than the tea party groups could have been targeted. If that's true, it suggests he just doesn't care about whether the IRS "targets" anyone other than his political allies.But I think the most likely explanation here is that Issa was simply trying to cook up a scandal, even though it did nothing to address the genuine problems with the way campaign finance and tax laws are written. He probably figured that in the best case scenario, he'd be able to get away with his fraud. And in the worst case scenario, he'd get a slap on the wrist from a few reporters, but endless approval from his political supporters....

The IRS‘ auditor told Congress this week that it stands by its determination that conservative groups were uniquely singled out for special scrutiny by the tax agency, rebutting Democrats’ contention that liberal groups also were targeted.

Agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) have called on the public and members of the U.S. Senate to oppose the “Gang of Eight” immigration bill on the eve of its expected vote in the Senate.

“The Schumer-Rubio-Corker-Hoeven proposal will make Americans less safe and it will ensure more illegal immigration—especially visa overstays—in the future. It provides legalization for thousands of dangerous criminals while making it more difficult for our officers to identity public safety and national security threats," they explained.

Looks like the report Obama wanted on gun violence has backfired on him a little. Looks like law abiding citizens with legal guns actually do save lives.

All joking aside, if you look at the facts as given in this report you will see how the hysteria over gun control truly is a product of media misinformation. I was stunned to see how disingenuously gun violence is reported. When gun control advocates throw out the numbers of gun deaths, they never tell you that those numbers include suicides, criminals killed by police or criminals killed by potential victims - they present the numbers as though all the people they talk about are innocent victims killed by criminals.

When Bloomberg went around on his little gun control tour where they read a list of "victims" of gun violence killed since Newtown, they included those same criminals - including the Boston Marathon bomber.

We can debate gun violence and gun control all you want, but at least be honest about it - oh, silly me - expecting the left to be honest and the mainstream media to be unbiased in their reporting.

...Gonzales had weeks to prepare for yesterday's hearing. But the man who sat at the witness table sounded like the sort of person who forgets where he parked his car.

Explaining his role in the botched firing of federal prosecutors, Gonzales uttered the phrase "I don't recall" and its variants ("I have no recollection," "I have no memory") 64 times. Along the way, his answer became so routine that a Marine in the crowd put down his poster protesting the Iraq war and replaced it with a running "I don't recall" tally.

Take Gonzales's tally along with that of his former chief of staff, who uttered the phrase "I don't remember" 122 times before the same committee three weeks ago, and the Justice Department might want to consider handing out Ginkgo biloba in the employee cafeteria.

Now we know that you're wrong.

You're post would imply that 2007 actually occurred, when we all know that on Right Wing Wacko Planet there is no such thing as history.

Since 2007 never occurred, Gonzales' crimes and refusal to testify honestly about turning the Attorney General's office into a political machine, cannot be considered.

On Monday, we learned that the IRS didn't single out tea party groups after all. Instead, they were looking for political groups, including not just tea party groups, but progressive groups as well. They may have used a flawed method for flagging the groups, but the IRS's intent was clear: to identify political groups that were not legally entitled to receive the tax-exempt benefit they sought to receive.

That pretty much brought the IRS "scandal" to a screeching halt. In the hours following the revelation, Darrell Issa's Twitter feed suddenly started spamming tweets about Benghazi. "Change the subject, quickly!" he seemed to be saying.

But there's still a question to be answered. If the IRS was targeting political groups from across the ideological spectrum, where did the original narrative about tea party targeting come from? The answer makes Darrell Issa and his fellow House Republicans look even worse than they did on Monday:

The Treasury inspector general (IG) whose report helped drive the IRS targeting controversy says it limited its examination to conservative groups because of a request from House Republicans.

A spokesman for Russell George, TreasuryÂ’s inspector general for tax administration, said they were asked by House Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.)Â“to narrowly focus on Tea Party organizations.Â”

Obviously, if Issa wanted a comprehensive investigation, he should have asked for a review of all politically oriented scrutiny. Instead, he asked for exclusive focus on tea party and conservative groups. Under the most charitable interpretation of this, it never occurred to Darrell Issa that anyone other than the tea party groups could have been targeted. If that's true, it suggests he just doesn't care about whether the IRS "targets" anyone other than his political allies.

But I think the most likely explanation here is that Issa was simply trying to cook up a scandal, even though it did nothing to address the genuine problems with the way campaign finance and tax laws are written. He probably figured that in the best case scenario, he'd be able to get away with his fraud. And in the worst case scenario, he'd get a slap on the wrist from a few reporters, but endless approval from his political supporters....

Apparently you haven't been paying attention. Gen Lee already posted an article refuting Oh my's little article.(Post 16644). The IG is standing by his report that Tea Party groups were targeted far more aggressively and harshly than any liberal groups.

<quoted text>Apparently you haven't been paying attention. Gen Lee already posted an article refuting Oh my's little article.(Post 16644). The IG is standing by his report that Tea Party groups were targeted far more aggressively and harshly than any liberal groups.

Nope

Paying attention.

Seems that we can all locate data demonstrating that someone agrees with our position.

The fact that Issa has a history of being a Right Wing Wacko scheming amoral corporate tool, bought by war profiteers years ago, who refuses to release entire transcripts, says it all for me.

More importantly, Right Wingers fixated on their newest shiny object and ignoring the actual destruction of our Constitution by Bush and Obama, bore me.

Nobody cares about the IRS "investigation" any more than anyone cared whether Clinton hit laid - it's just a shiny distraction from actual issues.

<quoted text>I try not to worry about things that are useless to worry about. Obamacare is the law of the land. I watched a broadcast on MSNBC where they interviewed an actual cancer patient. He was a writer or something like that and was uninsured when he was diagnosed with some sort of cancer. To make a long story short, he couldn't get insurance after he was diagnosed. Obamacare will alow him to get insurance that he needs to get the treatments that he needs even after he's diagnosed. I think it was on that Ed guy's show. If the guy can't get insurance and has to get medacaid doesn't the taxpayers have to pickup the tab anyway? I don't believe in that deathpanel BS. Get a grip girl.

Is'nt it nice your fellow man can live a little longer? How bout those deadbeat tax-free charities that spend billions of our tax dollars buying expensive real estate and big salaries for top execs and hade thier un taxed money in the Cayman islands?

Cry over her ignorance,self righthoueness, and cry over the fools who think she would be a good president. I don't know who in the hell your talking about someone from Kentucky? I don't mince words about romney or republicans that's dancing with the DEVIL!

We know who's to blame... Hillary. I certainly hope she's subpoenaed. Obama can globetrot, golf, FUNraise, make congratulatory phone calls to gays (good grief, dont forget the basketball player, too), Benghazi ISN'T going away... Your fearless leader needs to step up to the podium, without the friggin teleprompter & answer some questions. He's a proven WEAK leader, not only nationally, but globally... Come on libs, Bill Clinton even called him a WUSS. How embarassing!!!

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